#43 News of the Year: 2014 in retrospect

December 31, 2014

January:
Stolen: a shred of cloth stained with the blood of Pope John Paul II; meanwhile, on theshores of Lake Geneva, Syria’s ‘peace talks’ foaming with blood on both sides.

When fire sweeps through an old people’s home in small town Canada, water from firemen’s hoses turns to ice at 20 degrees below. More than 30 dead.

In the Ancient Kingdom of Fife, masked raiders hijack Glen the Baker’s delivery van (a few quid and a tray of Scotch pies); and hundreds queue to enter the memorial service for three-year-old Mikaeel Kular, whose body was found in woods close to his former home in Kircaldy.

Dennis McGuire (53) lay still after more than 10 minutes of ‘air hunger’ – heaving, choking, snorting and gasping . Danish manufacturers Lundbeck have stopped supplying the United States with lethal injections, and the country of Big Pharma has failed to produce a reliable replacement.

Mexico is ‘quickly turning into the China of the West’, with car production predicted to rise 60 per cent by 2020. In Mexico’s drug wars, however, modern production co-exists with medieval ritual. Thus the five bodies wrapped in white sheets, roped up and strung out along an underpass in the northern city of Saltillo; iconic as a crucifixion scene.

At the height of the tidal surge, photography student Harry Martin went shooting thestormiest waves off the South Devon coast – and never came back.

February
Upper Middle England is messing about in boats on wide, brown rivers dotted with cars and road signs half-submerged. Wellies and woolly jumpers instead of twinsets and pearls.

A dog called Killer has killed a ‘china doll’ called Ava-Jayne – the ‘doll’ being an 11-month-old baby. The incident took place in a town north of Manchester that just doesn’t matter any more. read more

#42 Glasgow: say nothing for the now

December 24, 2014

Resilience, rallying round, the heroism of Glasgow people (note: nobody said ‘Glaswegians’) as they ran to help others.

These soothing words came too soon; only hours after a driverless (‘driver’ seemingly slumped at the wheel) dustbin lorry – baby blue, built like a tank – skittled into Christmas shoppers, killing six of them as it careered alongside Glasgow’s George Square towards Queen Street station.

Of course such words were said, as of course they are largely true; but saying them too early, too often, too readily, only reduces their restorative power.

Better to be dumbfounded at first. Shocked into silence by arbitrary, unnecessary death, since it contains the possibility that our whole lives were always that way.

Then the first acknowledgement: still barely articulate; halting, half-formed, until finally finding the right words immediately finds us the road back to who we are.

Out of the bleak midwinter, the bare naked bulb, the room still dark even though thelights are on, at that moment we can seek to show that death has no dominion.

But even resurrection – especially resurrection – requires a prior period of utter desolation.

It so happens that both aspects are already written into the dual character ofGlasgow’s civic architecture:

Enlightened orderliness in George Square itself, planned by Georgians and completed by Victorians, in which it is declared that out of power and substance will come sweetness and light.

Matched by the menace of the Gothic (the University, the Stock Exchange, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral), which threatens to embalm the city while it is still alive.

Yes, in the wake of disaster would-be words of comfort will come trippingly off thetongue. What else can be said?

But there is a choice: we can either keep saying them until the right moment comes along, eventually; or perhaps say nothing for the now, so that in good time they will be better said. read more

#41 In The Balance

November 30, 2014

On the one hand your new born baby – head flat against outstretched palm, its body pushing back onto your lower arm like a monkey on a bed of leaves.

In your other hand, the stock of an AK-47, barrel pointing upwards – a vertical axis to complement the horizontal infant.

Do they weigh about the same – these two things, each gravitating to the crook of a different arm? I would have guessed the gun was heavier than the baby….. but you look so well balanced.

As one offsets the other, there is no sign of strain in your arms or shoulders – it seems you could stand like this forever. Meanwhile the tiniest tilt of your head, the less-than-half-a-smile playing across your lips, indicate the internal equilibrium of a Mona Lisa.

News reports of 31-year-old Abu Rumaysah, who skipped bail (awaiting trial for ‘encouraging terrorism’), and boarded a bus from Victoria coach station to join theJihadis of Islamic State (dodging MI5 turned out to be as easy as taking the Victoria Line from his North London home), have pointed to the gross discrepancy between left and right: innocent infant on one hand, shoot to kill on the other; two handfuls co-starring in the selfie he posted to celebrate arriving in Syria and the arrival of his new born son.

There is more to the disparity. Rumaysah’s given name is Siddartha. Given to him by his Hindu mother long before he converted to Islam, it is also the birth name of theBuddha. How ironic that the latterday Siddartha turned from ways of peace into a man o’war (and not even a proper war, at that).

Yet there is no getting away from the poise in the picture.

Although his actions are utterly misguided, absurdly lop-sided, and – yes, let’s have another layer of irony – he may even end up doing the same work for IS (press releases and web design, if reports are to be believed) that he could have picked up in London’s ‘creative industries’, nonetheless for a moment at least this man has found his spirit level. read more

#40 The President Un-Masked

November 18, 2014

On the top floor of the White House, a darkened room and a hidden painting – ThePicture of President Dorian.

How else to explain the Gray hair and his head otherwise unchanged?

Still smooth as caramel, iced coffee cool; and blue black lips plump as berries.

Those lines a little deeper only sculpt his features more. The something in the way he moves, remains unmoved; years in high office have left no tangible impression.

Yet the stock question – what lies behind the mask? – is not the one to ask.

Whichever way we do things now, it’s not true to the old pattern.

Myth versus reality, realpolitik opposed to airbrushed image – how Quark theexpression, how quaint.

Not even a conspiracy, Obama was ever the icon. As a mascot he will always remain unblemished; there never was another man behind the mask.

#39 Remembrance

November 9, 2014

Pace Wilfred Owen, it’s not an outright lie – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Remembrance ceremonies, such as the ceremony taking place this morning at London’s Cenotaph, enact the ‘sweet and noble’. A ritual of dulce et decorum, but not necessarily hollow. The falsification comes in the change of tense – not ‘to die’, Horace’s old line would be straight and true if it read: ‘to have died’.

On Remembrance Sunday, in the primary composition of former combatants, thesecondary role accorded to politicians and other civic dignitaries, and, above all, in thetwo, silent minutes of concerted contemplation, decorum is restored to all those who have died in bloody chaos.

In the moment, bodies broken open (more ghastly than grave robbing), bereft of sense and sensibility (only sensation, agonising sensation). But now they are people again, re-assembled in orderly progression.

The solemn procession, at its head our idea of the dead.

Take this, we say, for we do it remembrance of you. Which may be only partly true, but what else….?

Whichever side. Besides the Cause. There is nobility in having died, now it has been entered post festum.

#38 Top People’s Family In Free Fall

November 2, 2014

Pity the poor Establishment – now bordering on dysfunctional.

Since the summer the British elite has given away two of its elder daughters: first, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was obliged to step down from the government inquiry into historical child abuse, which she had been asked to chair; and now her replacement, Fiona Woolf, has been forced to go the same way.

Dame Elizabeth – thin lipped, fine boned – seems to symbolise the ascetic tradition among Britain’s ruling class. Loyalty to the law and devotion to the Anglican church have combined to keep her back straight throughout half a century of ‘public service’.

At this level, public service – yes, let’s lose the scare marks – is not without numerous privileges; but one should point out that at least as many demands are made of theprivate individuals who sign up for it.

These are the people who can speak of ‘one’ – one does this, one does not do that – without cracking up. As they see it, there’s no reason to be embarrassed by this antiquated term; instead there is every reason to expect the privileged to adhere to common standards.

Of course our club is exclusive, but anyone elected to it can be trusted to behave properly; hence ‘one’ is the proper noun with which to describe what any one of us would do.

Having previously combined senior judicial responsibilities with corporate tax law at thehighest level, Fiona Woolf has been closer to the money. Her year-long term of office as Lord Mayor of the City of London, which comes to an end in a few days’ time, amounts to a symbolic re-capitulation of the finance-oriented aspect of her stellar career.

If Butler-Sloss dresses in the manner of Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth century archbishop and Protestant martyr, Mrs Woolf is more what you’d expect of Kim Kardashian’s great aunt – plucked eyebrows and lipstick to tone in with hairsprayed hair (from bronze to blond); and two-piece, fitted suits from material that might have been made into wall-hangings in the Chelsea church where she sings in the choir. read more

#37 Wellbeing Versus Human Being

October 26, 2014

Plumped-up eyelids and pale skin, tippled pink…..

But the Renee Zellweger of Bridget Jones’ Diary has been replaced by a new Renee – let’s call her Wellzeger, who is tanned and taut and athletic enough to be Australian (in an Elle Macpherson kind of way).

When Ms Zellweger premiered her healthy new look at the Elle magazine Women In Hollywood awards last week, there was much talk of the ‘work’ she had (had) done to achieve it; although she said she was looking better simply because she has learned to live better.

Take your pick, but there is no doubt about the demand of the day: by any means necessary, make me an icon of ‘wellness’; let me exude the idea of rude health, or I may never work in this town again.

Meanwhile, in the pages of Interview magazine…..

Wasted. Blasted. Playing at being brain dead. A bevy of expensively attired legs, bums, breasts and pouty lips splayed out on the filthy floor of a concrete bunker. Slack limbed and glassy eyed, models acting as mannequins in a pantomime of silk and squalor.

The flipside of ‘wellness’, but no antidote; rather, Fabien Baron’s ‘Wasted’ fashion shoot only shows that today’s cult of health and wellbeing is capable of moving in mysterious ways – up to and including its opposite.

Cut from the cult to the case Dr Stella Adadevoh, who died of Ebola after she herself prevented the disease from spreading through Nigeria.

When Patrick Sawyer, a recent arrival from Liberia, was admitted to Dr Adadevoh’s clinic suffering from ‘malaria’, she refused to believe him; more importantly, despite his protests and threats she refused to let him leave the clinic until tested for Ebola. Thetests proved positive and the good doctor was duly rewarded with a dose of the deadly virus.

Dr Adadevoh died alone – though her husband and son were nearby, they were obliged to remain behind a closed window – in a disused TB hospital set aside for Nigeria’s Ebola patients. But thousands if not millions more Nigerians have survived because her decisive action succeeded in limiting the spread of the disease. read more

#36 Three Circles of Hell

October 19, 2014

1) The Abyss of Nothing

‘Whiteout’, said one survivor. ‘Blackout conditions’, said another. A third man reported stumbling through ‘an abyss of nothing.’

These are escapees from the shoulder-high snow and flattening winds which hit theAnnapurna mountain trail unexpectedly last week, at the height of Nepal’s tourist trekking season.

Nearly 40 bodies have been recovered so far; but hundreds have survived – either snatched out of the snow by keen-eyed, sharp-clawed helicopter pilots, or straggling down the mountainside as best they could, clutching at straws which turned out to be guide poles trailing the way down to safety.

Down to the non-descript place where patches of snow give way to blotches of warm earth; and queues of bedraggled survivors look like they’re waiting for the Night Bus home.

Messy.

Yet how splendid it must have been to come down in the world; to re-enter a lower realm of relative comfort, largely as you left it.

When the trekkers went up, however, weren’t they saying goodbye to all that? Pristine, surely, is what they were after. Above the snow line: the absence of things; and theend of men.

‘Blizzard conditions where the ground became the same as the sky and it was difficult to see which way was up and which way was down’, as one survivor described them, are also the preconditions for the Inhuman Being which tourist-trekkies are sort of, kind of looking for – aren’t they?

They may not admit it, and perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it – safer to have said they were searching for the Abominable Snowman.

Whoever he is, they only wanted to touch the hem of his garment; but when the Nepalese weather turned unexpectedly absolute, last week’s search party found themselves draped and dying in it.

2) The Abyss of Everything

A hospital waiting room where there’s no need to wait – surely no such thing. But now there is, in Dallas. Patients have fled the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital after one man died there and two of his nurses contracted the Ebola virus. read more

#35 Impersonal Freedom

October 5, 2014

I AM a number, I will be a free man.

Hong Kong protesters have flipped the defining statement repeatedly issued by Number Six in the 1960s cult TV series, The Prisoner: ‘I am not a number, I am a free man’.

They readily identify themselves by the start date of their street protests: 926 (26 September); they show affinity with 8964 (6 April 1989), the day the Chinese authorities broke up the pro-democracy protest camp in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

In the East, pro-democracy activists are accustomed to using numbers to sidestep censorship. In their eyes, numbers can be symbols of freedom.

Largely impersonal, because not attached to a named person; but by no means inhuman.

On the Western side of the world, however, protestors rarely regard numbers in such a positive light. They don’t see themselves in numbers; they don’t look comfortable even when – not often nowadays – they find themselves in great numbers. Being one of a number seems almost as hurtful as being reduced to a number.

No freedom, they seem to be saying, without first protecting my personality.

In Hong Kong there appears to be less concern about loss of personality.

When thousands of protestors cross their forearms at the same moment, with one voice semaphoring ‘wrong’ to chief executive C.Y. Leung and, behind him, Beijing, they don’t feel the need to be embarrassed about acting in unison.

Instead, in many different ways – passers-by spraying sit-down demonstrators with cool water; constant litter patrols and the sharing out of visors and masks for use against police tear gas and pepper spray – the level of cooperation among Hong Kong protesters and their supporters suggests that they are comfortable not only in their own skin; but also in each others’.

Meanwhile in the West the cult of personality threatens to rarefy still further the already intermittent call for freedom. read more

#34 If IS is ‘staggeringly brutal’, why?

September 28, 2014

On Friday 26 September British MPs voted by 524 votes to 43 to back UK government plans to bomb Islamic State (IS) on account of its ‘staggering brutality’.

A week earlier the wife of the British taxi driver held hostage by Islamic State had appealed to his captors to find it in their hearts to release him. Alan Henning remains on IS’s death row, facing the possibility of execution following the televised beheading oftwo Americans and one British citizen.

A few days after her appeal, Islamic State sent Barbara Henning a recording of her husband pleading for his life. Since she had only recently entered a heartfelt plea for mercy on his behalf, the IS response seems peculiarly heartless.

But if there is a staggering absence where you’d expect their hearts to grow, what is it that has led to such heartlessness among IS militants?

The staggering brutality of the West, is their answer; inflicted on (Sunni) Muslims everywhere to such an extent that their own form of staggering brutality is the only course of action left open to them.

But the West has been brutal to non-Western peoples for far more than a hundred years, promoting or suppressing them in its own interests, and not counting the cost (to them) – all this without often prompting such brutality in return.

On this account, the particular character of Islamic State remains unaccounted for.

Neither does the region’s natural environment offer a credible explanation. The desert sun was equally relentless seven thousand years ago as it shone down on ‘the cradleof civilisation’ in the territory now occupied by Islamic State. Likewise, the brutal heat ofthe midday sun may account for crucifixion as an ancient method of execution, but it does not explain why IS has only now set about resurrecting it.

Neither imperial history nor the forces of nature can explain the ‘staggering brutality’ of IS. read more

World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Yearly Archives: 2014